a dissolute lifestyle has its rewards



Last night, over drinks in a bar as cool as the frost on Tori Spelling's lipstick, cool as the verb to be, I decided that too many see the blurring of fantasy and reality as a troubling matter instead of an erotic drive; something like sexuality, if I could remember what that was.   I am not one to crave pain; waking up is quite enough thank you.   I don’t need things to be particularly real; reality is all around me, I can’t get out of it.   You and I are not ones to insist on truth, on absolutes, on an urgent separation of fiction from fact, movies from real life.   We buy truth, fuck with absolutes, the way you rent a video or fuck someone.

Last night after a frenzy of icy cocktails, while watching sexy young things eye one another up, when I tried to discuss sex and violence, careers on the rocks, the fickle machinery of fame, when I made digressions on cracked-up beauty, the only thing you would say was ‘yuck’.   I have heard you say many things, other nights.   I have heard you talk about being knocked up, I have heard you talk about being strung-out, I’ve heard you mutter language so blue I mistook it for a pool, but last night the only word you would say was 'yuck'.   And it brought tears to my eyes the way you said it. So I ordered another drink.   And it was so icy that I got a headache that started in my teeth.   I smoked one more cigarette and that did it.   I felt really numb, a bit sick, and getting sicker.

Before cocktails you and I had watched a film.   We took notes as we watched it.   We made lists.   We were conspiratorial.   Later maybe I was too drunk to understand, perhaps your words were slurred, but maybe your just saying 'yuck' made sense.   You were saying something about how our tireless pursuit of information, our insatiable need to be hip and new is just as ugly as any other pursuit of power.   In fact when I came to, after our trashy night, I admired your baldness, your blunt precision.   I think what you meant was they’re sticky subjects - fantasy/reality, I/you, fame/oblivion - not dichotomies, but the same thing seen from different vantages.   It made me want to give it all up, end the madness.   To go and work in a biscuit factory in the Midlands and forget everything that I have ever known.   But then someone would find me and write about me in The Face, and suddenly everyone would be doing it.   For years I have pitied people who need religion, but don’t we have the same sickness?   The need for something else, something bigger than us?   One more drink, and then another, and the next thing you know...   You saying ‘yuck’ was not such a bad response to everything we have seen and done.   But this morning when I telephoned to clarify, your answering machine was on.   You weren’t taking any calls.

As if you were busy.   As if you had a life.   I pity you.   I pity myself sometimes.   Like right now.